Batman: The Dark Knight Rises Review

The Dark Knight causes things to fall from skyscrapers
in bat-like formation

I saw this movie at the 12:01 am showing on Friday the 20th, dressed in a Batman shirt, a long black cape, and a painted-on face mask that took 10 minutes of scrubbing to get out of my pores. No I'm not a nerd....

I haven't been a long-time comic book or movie fan of the series, but Nolan's movies garnered good enough reviews for me to finally decide to see Heath Ledger's Joker. Once I did that, I was hooked. I could probably now quote for you all the different Robins and their plotlines as well as give you a basic rundown of the number of times Superman and Batman have interacted! That's in the DC comics anyway.

For the movie itself, a big detractor was seeing it from midnight to 3 am. That's the time I'm usually asleep as my job dicates I should be awake at 6 to be on the road for work by 6:30. (I work from 7am to 4pm and it takes half an hour to get there). Some of the hugest moments were detracted from by the simple fact that I thought I might be hallucinating at one point or another due to my tiredness. But down to actual business...
Great Movie, Fantastic Actors, Long Plot: The movie itself was beautifully and artistically done. From the gritty detailing on every set to the beautiful lighting that highlighted moods and the gorgeous music, this is a movie worth seeing on the basis of its artistic reasoning alone. Christopher Nolan doesn't mess around with CGI when he can avoid it and the attention to detail shows. Everything was designed to suck you into this movie and carefully lay out the desolation and despair of Gotham, which it did. I remember being concerned when Anne Hathaway was cast as Catwoman, but between watching her flip backwards out of a window to seeing my first glimpse of her in the catsuit, all doubts vanished and were replaced by something like:

Point made



She sure is flexible, and how could she not be Catwoman, she's perfect!

Yes, I understand the reasonings that Michelle Pfieffer was better, but seriously, Hathaway's Catwoman fit perfectly into the Gotham that Nolan created.

Okay, apart from all that, the movie was really long. I mean, 3 entire hours of death and destruction it took to lead up to a happy ending for most of the characters involved. I really wanted Bane to be the all around bad guy, and no one answered how Bruce Wayne survives the liver splitting knife attack by Talia Al'Ghul. I guess we're just supposed to assume that he magically got to a surgeon and a hospital in time to get that along with his radiation treated. Also, what about that bomb? A bomb that by all accounts had only 20 seconds to be flown far enough out to the ocean so no one got hurt. Not even the Batman could escape at least severe radiation poisoning. That's just the magic of comic books I suppose, makes you forget about all the dead fish and mutated whales out there.